Category: Expedition

We have been working on the tech demo for about ten weeks now. The Slashware forums are now up again after many years! please head >>> there <<< to discuss this update or anything about the game.

We added a 3D scene for James Cook’ campaign cutscene, including dynamic lighting. The script for this first cutscene was designed and the images that will be rendered on the scrolled are being produced.

We also have a new title screen, with art made by Jaime Robles. We were considering doing a 3D title screen instead but I’m kind of liking how it looks.

For the campaign selection view, we created a component to generate portraits, and integrated it with our first pack of art for portraits. We plan to expand upon it adding more variety. We also added tooltips for several components on this screen, including the crew members, the ship and its equipment. Finally, we also added special portraits for the expedition leaders and tweaked the layout.

We worked on different things for the exploration view, one first thing we added is a very simple simulation of the wind direction, it changes randomly and affects the speed of the ship, this means you have to adjust your course in order to make the best use of the wind (sailing against the wind is difficult!)

We also added music tracks for the title, cutscene, and world (based on current weather). We are currently using the tracks from the original Expedition project.

Looking forward to having a playable campaign, we loaded a new map covering the journey from Plymouth to Rio de Janeiro, we also experimented with tree billboards for the forest sections of the world and made it so that cities can be loaded from a list which we will further expand in the future.

We added commands to allow the player to change time compression, in order to make long event-less voyages bearable. In the future, it’s going to pause automatically whenever something interesting happens.

We worked further in the Storm’s View, doing several graphical tweaks and enhancing the integration with the buoyancy script. We also added a simple model for ship damage based on the difference between the ship’s heading and wind direction.

The game now displays the integrity of different parts of the ship and shows a ship sunk event when hull integrity reaches 0 (Game over!)

Populate campaign details screen with a long list of crew members, including tooltips with their names.

The project’ artists have also been hard at work, delivered the first pack of art for the portraits, and a new cover art which we are still deciding if will be used for the title screen or for the website and marketing material.

Another aspect we also invested quite a bit of time on, was changing the whole water system to use a different library. Even tho we are not using all the features of the plugin (the entire refraction system, for instance), it has allowed us to display foam in the shorelines, create the Storm scene with big waves and simulating buoyancy on the ship, as well as some additional effects.

Added (and then broke) a minimap system where the game world gets unveiled as you explore.

Add a “journal”-like thing to the HUD, displaying the date, location, supplies, mood, and weather info.

Add a day/night cycle, time goes by and is reflected on the lighting conditions of the main map.

Moved away from the fantasy land and into Earth

Added “rain” particle effect for when it rains.

Decided to go 3D for the main map view instead of the antique map aesthetic. Invested quite a bit of time on making the water look fine.

Added instance-able test towns including test town view.

Added temp title screen.

Acquired and imported Earth’s terrain elevation data (mainly from 2000’s NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission), for a sector including the Caribbean, Central America, and part of South America.

Along with these developments, I’ve been working on finishing the GDD and the plans for the completed Tech Demo. We are focusing on finishing a test scenario, and soon we are going to have more involvement from a cool 2D artist to bring the UI to life. The title screen painting is also being worked on now.